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I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers, but will run quite speedily on any

I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers, but will run quite speedily on any supported arch from a few tens of MB of memory. The APK package manager is pleasant and quick, and the package list is quite extensive.

Atreiden 3y ago
Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc
- dmwilcox 3y ago
  I've run musk based distro for a couple of years with no trouble (KISS Linux and now some hacked up Alpine monster I put together). I don't do streaming video that requires DRM -- which will be a non-starter due to the widevine/whatever plugins being compiled against glibc. But yeah, full Wayland desktop (well, sway) and Firefox -- no problem. I occasionally use a debian chroot to pull up gnucash (accounting program) which works as a backup but it's rare. My debian chroot is mostly to run a 10 year old printer driver from Epson that's compiled against glibc, but doing a little trickery with a small C program works just fine with CUPS still running in alpine (print filters operate on stdin and stdout, so you can launch them in a chroot by themselves no problem).
  - anthk 3y ago
    You can run gcompat and some AppImage for that DRM crap. Ditto with the CUPS driver. Not an appimage, you might be able to set up that CUPS binary with gcompat.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
I've used Alpine Linux also but I found it very unintuitive for a general Linux distro (I used to like configuring things like Alpine but I've lost the spark for it and now I just want something light that works. DSL used to be like that.)
mbar84 3y ago
Do you know which of these would be best suited to customization? I'd like to create a linux live distro only run a single application.

Atreiden 3y ago

Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc

dmwilcox 3y ago
I've run musk based distro for a couple of years with no trouble (KISS Linux and now some hacked up Alpine monster I put together). I don't do streaming video that requires DRM -- which will be a non-starter due to the widevine/whatever plugins being compiled against glibc. But yeah, full Wayland desktop (well, sway) and Firefox -- no problem. I occasionally use a debian chroot to pull up gnucash (accounting program) which works as a backup but it's rare. My debian chroot is mostly to run a 10 year old printer driver from Epson that's compiled against glibc, but doing a little trickery with a small C program works just fine with CUPS still running in alpine (print filters operate on stdin and stdout, so you can launch them in a chroot by themselves no problem).
- anthk 3y ago
  You can run gcompat and some AppImage for that DRM crap. Ditto with the CUPS driver. Not an appimage, you might be able to set up that CUPS binary with gcompat.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

I've used Alpine Linux also but I found it very unintuitive for a general Linux distro (I used to like configuring things like Alpine but I've lost the spark for it and now I just want something light that works. DSL used to be like that.)

mbar84 3y ago

Do you know which of these would be best suited to customization? I'd like to create a linux live distro only run a single application.